From Paper to Screen: A Stupendous Transformation of a Literary Work

A creative work is much celebrated by the public. The creator is treated on a par with God. The creator, familiarly known as author, enjoys a special status in society. What accounts the author to have been bestowed with such distinctive treatment? An author is special because in him or her is honed the skill of procreation: a magical talent of transforming the dreary, stultifying, drab world into palatable, scrumptious delicacy tailored to the taste of art gourmet: that consumes it with the necessity to fill the intellectual cavern of hunger, to quench the hogging fire of a dearth of artistic exercise and production and to revel in discussions, to forget the permeating illness of a surrounding that does suck the sap of energy in forms of humans. No doubt that a creative art form with such enormity of reception and energy to stir the minds and hearts of the readers and viewers, in the case of performing art forms, should never go unnoticed and should have had a greater reach into the masses. Such type of creativity and those that create them are not to be slighted. However, there runs the under current of a responsibility of choosing the creation, as all that is written are not special. Most are unpalatable, indigestible, unfit to be consumed and bring with them elements of toxicity to breath out bacteria that help with both digestion and securing nutrients. The onus of culling and glorifying a creative work of literature rests with the consumers for whom the literary work is especially tailored.

How does a work get created? Certainly, those that create populate the earth and share with the ordinary public the world that they inhabit. The milieu remains the same for both the author and the audiences. A work of literature gets engrossed with the reader when there is mutual sharing of experiences portrayed. It is not mandatory that the readers should hail from the same territory to imbibe the events depicted and characters' world of survival. Any literary work could have in it glimpses of daily life that match with the lives of readers, though there never is a chance of a complete matching with an individual reader's life. As the readers read a literary work, they simultaneously construct the world inhabited by the characters of fictitious origin. The readers voluntarily subject themselves to feelings of vicariousness and readily transform themselves as those of fictitious beings and travel with the imaginary characters and identify themselves with either one or more of those fictitious personalities. In the process of involving themselves in the creative work, the readers invent figures so personally configured, the milieu much akin to the place of their living and the application of logic that is whimsical and suits to the personal gains of the character of their liking. As works of art are engendered owing to the experience of their creator, the experience may be personal as the author is ready to share his travails of life or the author would have been a witness to a horrifying event which coerced him or her to react and rouse passion to do something about the catastrophe, their validity must be put to test. Those works of art that withstand the ordeal of screening and establish themselves as serious work of literature, have the capacity to penetrate into the masses and camp firmly in their hearts. At this juncture comes in the genre of film, that takes an interest in the literary work and is very much at transforming, mutating and decorating it in a new garb. Film is an extended art form of drama as it comes under the category of performing arts. Drama has a limited arena for its enactment, in other words drama is confined to four walls or during the time of Shakespeare to much limited resources for production both in terms of props and actors. Film can be called a stage that has the magical feature of accommodating much in its length and breadth and also can tour and adopt to seasons. Films rely much on script for the screen which is otherwise known as screenplay. Screenplay is the story teller or the narrator that decides the sequence of events and their queue. When a popular literary work attracts the attention of a film maker, he or she would occupy in writing a screen story. A salient feature of movies that is films is the use of camera as stage which has an independent capacity, non dependability, either on the actors or on dialogues for narrating the story. The involvement of the camera actually requires a screenplay as there is the possibility of narrating the story sans dialogues. The transformation of a written literary work into a moving picture is stupendous as the black image of letters on white sheet incarnates into animated forms, often with much support from backdrops and variegated display of fine colour. As the written work takes the avatar of a movie either in black and white or colour it comes into clash with the readers' vicarious world, as there is no guarantee that the movie maker's fantasising goes in accordance with any reader's creation of the virtual world of the black letters. No sooner does the reader see the movie than he/she is caught with mixed feelings of either nausea, aversion if the screen version portrays images contrary to their visualisation or a slight discomfort if some anthropomorphs go well with their virtual story.

For a raw viewer, one who is a stranger to the written version, a well made movie that has absorbed in itself the grammar of a movie, looks quite nice in terms of its making. However the raw viewer disqualifies himself/herself from participating in thorough critique of the screen version as the ignorance on the part of the raw viewer prevents a knowledge of changes and liberties taken of it. A major motion picture could succeed in eliciting remark as it surpasses in its screen version in successfully transforming the tenets of written composition into visual nuances where images and angles of camera usurp characters and act as conveyance of theme and subject. Pier Paolo Pasolini presents the gospel of St Mathew in neo realistic style and his portrayal of Oedipus is tinged in modern crisis. Those two are examples of how a known and popular fiction could be put to an entirely different treatment on the screen. As the genres have in them complex variations and could also allow themselves to be amenable to rich, powerful, innovative ways of treatment of subject matter and theme, the audiences are in for two different banquets on decorated platters of magnificence.